what is "immersion"?

[Deleted]

You want immersion? Toggle off auto-run and zoom your camera to first-person mode.
Keybind your abilities and use Alt-Z to toggle off the interface.

It's the closest you will come to immersion in this game.

[quras]

Immersion.

Whatever sucks you into the game and hours later when you finally log off, you think to yourself, "WTF! I spent that much time in game!"

Doesn't matter what it was or what others are doing. What got you lost in game and real time suddenly zipped by. It was 8:00pm when you started and suddenly it's midnight.

that is immersion for me. Something that entertained me to the point I lost track of time. I was so zoned into the game, time just slipped past me.

Thats my immersion and how I define it.

[Deleted]

You want immersion? Toggle off auto-run and zoom your camera to first-person mode.
Keybind your abilities and use Alt-Z to toggle off the interface.

It's the closest you will come to immersion in this game.

You can be immersed without first person mode.

[ReleaseDay]

first boss in soo

[Totle]

First boss of the Siege of Ogrimmar raid

[Deleted]

Immersion is the feeling that you're actually in the game world. Games like Skyrim, for instance, are heavy on immersion, and indeed, have things like Frostfall: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/11163/, which simulates the effects of hypothermia on your character. People who like immersion want to feel as if they're really in the game and not someone behind the screen.

It's a valid criticism in WoW. Night time is as bright as day time. Weather effects barely exist in-game. Flying mounts have perpetuated a generation of players who zip from objective to objective without having to muscle through the terrain.

well said and I fully agree

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You can also avoid that platoon by walking around it, or simply choose to not fly in those situations. That's the thing with immersion, it's subjective. While you may not like flying over that platoon, someone else will.
Now I'll probably get told that people don't want to spend a second longer than absolutely necessary, which is, again, their own choice.

give it up already

nobody that actually understands what immersion is likes flying

[mauserr]

"immersion" is a word being used to destroy a well designed game.

Pretty much this. People should go play Skyrim with a ton of "immersive" mods if they want "immersion".

first boss in soo

First boss of the Siege of Ogrimmar raid

"Dear Immersius
...
Yours,
Someone who can't even spell your name properly."

For fuck's sake, where do all these people crawl from...

[Deleted]

Pretty much this. People should go play Skyrim with a ton of "immersive" mods if they want "immersion".





"Dear Immersius
...
Yours,
Someone who can't even spell your name properly."

For fuck's sake, where do all these people crawl from...

no you should go play facebook games

[urasim]

Immersion is the feeling that you're actually in the game world. Games like Skyrim, for instance, are heavy on immersion, and indeed, have things like Frostfall: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/11163/, which simulates the effects of hypothermia on your character. People who like immersion want to feel as if they're really in the game and not someone behind the screen.

It's a valid criticism in WoW. Night time is as bright as day time. Weather effects barely exist in-game. Flying mounts have perpetuated a generation of players who zip from objective to objective without having to muscle through the terrain.

I get immersion from flying, so I don't know what you're talking about. How about stop trying to push your immersion onto me, thanks.

[gamingmuscle]

give it up already

nobody that actually understands what immersion is likes flying

Personal preference is different. It can break your personal immersion. It's not that flying breaks immersion its that you dislike it so much that it does. For you.

[CELKali]

Immersion is subjective. It depends on the person, and even their mood. Sometimes I love the realistic nature of playing hard mode in Fallout New Vegas, other times I want to shoot myself for ever considering it.

It also helps to have a big screen. I find it easy to throw myself into a game, show, or movie, and that big screen makes it even easier. Shit, I can immerse myself into Civ V. I just call it 'getting really into the game'.

[Deviant]

I feel comments like this are what gave birth to mario kart, kingdom hearts and smash brothers. Mashed bastardizations of franchises that have no rhyme or reason. Story is really a big driving point for me... especially one that makes sense. WoW is like Walmart to me more and more. Add more pop culture and conveniences because more people will like that...

Kingdom hearts 2 final mix is a work of art.

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well said and I fully agree

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give it up already

nobody that actually understands what immersion is likes flying

I understand what it is and I like flying...

[Yig]

People make immersion far too literal and don't understand it. There's acceptable believability and feeling inside of the game, and there's flow state.
Flow state is a massive aspect of immersion. Literalists don't understand how you can be "immersed" in third person perspective, it's hilarious but frustrating as they flounder to argue what they think immersion is. Game designers are looking for flow state, immersion is another word for it. But there is a special kind of immersion where the world feels like it exists for your brain as an inner universe somewhere you can access and interact in, you can feel inside of, and a part of, and like you can effect it and explore it.

Nuance does hugely important things for this kind of immersion, magnitudes which are massive in importance. But nuance is subtle, like the way an ear ring will move when you walk, foot steps in the snow, ears flopping, sun light refracting and surround objects obscuring the sun directly, grass moving in the wind. People can hand wave these tiny things away as meaningless and claim gameplay or new raids are what is important and this is a waste of time,.. it's forever an issue mired in conflicting appreciations of context.

People complain about their immersion being broken over ridiculous things, but it's a subjective and very blurry area. But overall, flow state is the heart of the thing. And very tiny things can break immersion for someone, it's not a science. But you can be very good at getting a lot of people more immersed in something than others, you can make it an artform. Via storytelling, via world building, via skilled puppeteering and believing a puppet on someone's hand is alive. Context is so fragile here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does.

[Kaleredar]

nobody that actually understands what immersion is likes flying

Broad strokes much?

They should make more zones that are immersive with flying. like Sholazar, or storm peaks, or Icecrown.

All of those zones were more "immersive" than the timeless isle.

Jamming people on the ground to make it take more time doesn't make you more immersed in a world. If you believe that, YOU do not understand immersion.

[Flaks]

Broad strokes much?

They should make more zones that are immersive with flying. like Sholazar, or storm peaks, or Icecrown.

All of those zones were more "immersive" than the timeless isle.

Jamming people on the ground to make it take more time doesn't make you more immersed in a world. If you believe that, YOU do not understand immersion.

For the most part, Blizzard doesn't seem to understand immersion.

[Yig]

Flying can be very immersive, seeing the wind flapping the leathery skin on your mounts wings, turbulence in their animations, clouds in Uldum you can fly through, if we could do barrel rolls to the side in conjunction with the way our flying mounts can dive and rise it would feel amazing.

The thing that flying does negatively to immersion is robbing you of the sense of a small scale world being bigger than it is and turning the game into a bland repetive exercise in relaying deliveries.

Flying can be incredibly immersive, but it can also damage the atmosphere of a game based on a virtual world. Limitations are often required to preserve immersion, lke when you're watching a movie. You are totally captivated by the story, let's use the Fellowship of the Ring as an example. Imagine if when the Balrog faces Gandalf on the Bridge of Kazad Dum, some top 40 pop music like Katy Perry started playing out of nowhere in the soundtrack.

People here would argue you should "just be able to ignore the Katy Perry song while Gandalf battles Durin's Bane", but while this is subjective aesthetics, come on. Who are you kidding?

People who don't understand the sense of of "journeying" across a fantastic landscape on a quest as an archetypal fantasy adventurer, exploring new paths and wondering "what's around that next bend in the road?" (or hill or corner), they don't understand how giving you the option to circumvent all that for convenience can create something in the back of your mind, like Katy Perry music, that doesn't belong there but you can't ignore it even if you're supposed to choose.

[Graeham]

For me it's being able to feel invested in the game world and care about what is going on around my character. I find it difficult to invest in an MMO if there isn't a decent story and intriguing characters. It can be a lot of fun to kill a powerful looking boss in a raid or dungeon but it's even more satisfying when there's an established reason to bring the fight to a particular enemy.

It's also the subtle details such as the sky getting darker when night falls and water rippling against the shore of a lake. Stuff like that helps a lot as well.

[Yig]

For the most part, Blizzard doesn't seem to understand immersion.

Bullshit. You don't understand there are many flavors of immersion and you just see your own. Blizzard's seamless world building without instances using hand crafted looking zones with individually crafted hand painted trees and flowers and shrubbery with deliberate placement and foreshadowing was completely unprecedented in MMOs at the time of it's release, and the way this lent itself to immersion over seeing the same exact tree model stamped 1000 times like you would in early MMOs with vast voids of randomly generated terrain was invaluable. You don't understand why flying can both be immersive and damaging to immersion. There is a spectrum here of values to appreciate beyond your own.

[Flaks]

Bullshit. You don't understand there are many flavors of immersion and you just see your own. Blizzard's seamless world building without instances using hand crafted looking zones with individually crafted hand painted trees and flowers and shrubbery with deliberate placement and foreshadowing was completely unprecedented in MMOs at the time of it's release, and the way this lent itself to immersion over seeing the same exact tree model stamped 1000 times like you would in early MMOs with vast voids of randomly generated terrain was invaluable. You don't understand why flying can both be immersive and damaging to immersion. There is a spectrum here of values to appreciate beyond your own.

I said nothing about how Blizzard was, only about how it is.

That supposed hand crafting of things is for the most part as automated as the next assembly line nowadays just like the streamlining of most things in this game. A lot of the things that lent immersion to the game were removed for the sake of convenience.

They seem to want to take it all back now though but too little too late. They've made the playerbase to convenience >>>> losing yourself in a game world and so trying to go back is only going to end up shooting themselves in the foot financially.

That said, the questing experience is still pretty immersive, I'm not at all going to deny that and that's part of the reason I come back to the game for maybe the first month of each of the past 2 expansions. Beyond that, the end game is anything but and goes out of it's way to spit on role playing in just about any way because apparently the vast majority of the playerbase wants to be told how to play the game.

[Asmekiel]

give it up already

nobody that actually understands what immersion is likes flying

Sorry that I have a different opinion than you. Sorry that you can't seem to grasp different people like different things. But no, you're wrong.